3 Worse Potential Resume Blunders Than Scott Thompson’s Yahoo Debacle

New Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson has currently come under fire because his resume, as indicated in company filings, said he had degrees in accounting and computer science. Unfortunately, it appears the accounting degree didn’t aid in accounting for the number of degrees he had, namely: one. He never attained a computer science degree. This has led to complaints from a major Yahoo shareholder and a board investigation. That said, as far as exaggerating on a resume goes, it could be worse!

3 Worse Things That Could Get You In Trouble On Your Resume

1. You say you are proficient in Powerpoint, when in fact you have never used Powerpoint in your life. You have “powerfully” pointed laser pens on an IMAX screen up Vin Diesel’s nostrils during movie trailers for Fast Five, which in itself is an accomplishment because he was in fast moving, exploding cars throughout the trailer. However, your embellishment will especially be difficult to overcome, given you also lied on your resume that you had a film degree, and now have to do a Powerpoint presentation explaining to your company’s Board of Directors at We Make Vin Diesel Films Inc. why they should let you continue to run the company’s 72-Minutes-of-Cars-Racing-and-Minimal-Dialog-Script development department.

2. You say you are proficient in many languages including Sindarin, Klingon, and Latin. “This will make me sound like a nerd genius,” you think, “all of these languages are fictional, or have not been spoken, since, like 1500, or something?” Sounded like a good idea until a visitor from a future society that has developed Klingon as its planet-wide language abducts you and your boss in a time machine, and brings both of you back to Ancient Rome for a Hunger Games style gladiator battle. Good luck translating the Coliseum home field rules to your boss in that situation, especially with psychic lions who only understand commands in the soon-to-be-invented language Sindarin nipping at your heels.

3. You say you can type 200 words a minute. Again, it seemed like a minor embellishment, as you can probably repeatedly type words “Xi”, “Qi”, and “Za”, all of which are acceptable in Scrabble, at that speed. Unfortunately, your sneaky Scrabble triple word score ways won’t help you when your boss inherits a warehouse full of typewriters from his beloved eccentric uncle. As the uncle is eccentric, and wrote his will in 1975, when his typewriter company was very valuable, he puts a stipulation in the will that your boss will inherit the uncle’s entire typewriter/3D-printing empire if he can successfully auction off all the typewriters in under an hour. Since you are so good at typing, your boss says you must demonstrate the usefulness of the typewriters to the auction attendees, and also type a real-time transcript of everything the auctioneer says. To make matters worse, as is typical in eccentric-wealthy-uncle inheritance situations, the warehouse is haunted. And if you’ve learned anything from the movie the Shining, overcoming evil forces to type what you want in haunted commercial buildings is very difficult, especially at 200 words a minute.